Rancho Tehama sits in Tehama County, a sparsely populated area northwest of Sacramento and southwest of Red Bluff. Its 1,485 residents live among oak and pine-covered hills, with wildlife roaming between scattered domestic cattle. It is the kind of place where neighbors know each other's business, where sheriff's deputies are few and far between, and where disputes can simmer for months without resolution. For Kevin Janson Neal, a 44-year-old with a documented history of mental illness and conspiracy theory obsessions, a neighborhood feud had been building toward explosion. His neighbors had obtained a restraining order against him. He had been arrested for stabbing one of them. Despite a court order to surrender his firearms, Neal had been manufacturing his own guns, untraceable weapons built in violation of the law.

The rampage began before dawn on November 14. Neal killed a man and woman he wrongly suspected of dealing methamphetamine, both neighbors caught in his paranoid rage. He then commandeered a pickup truck and began firing at random vehicles and pedestrians, working his way toward the elementary school. When he crashed through the school's front gates, teachers and a custodian had already activated the lockdown. Neal exited with a homemade AR-15-style rifle and ran into the center of the quadrangle, firing repeatedly at windows and walls. One bullet penetrated a classroom wall and struck a student hiding under a desk. A six-year-old was shot in the chest. But the locked doors held. Neal could not reach the children inside.

Frustrated, Neal shot and wounded a passerby who had stopped to ask if he was okay, stole the man's car, and continued his rampage. He fired 15 bullets into another vehicle, striking a man named Cardenas in the leg. Law enforcement was now in pursuit. A Corning police officer and a Tehama County Sheriff's deputy rammed the stolen truck, bringing it to a stop. Neal opened fire on the officers, striking their vehicle five times. They returned fire. Then Neal turned one of his weapons on himself, ending the rampage with a single shot above his left eye. Twenty-five minutes. Eight crime scenes. Five dead, eighteen wounded.

The shootings exposed the limitations of California's gun laws. Neal had been prohibited from possessing firearms under his restraining order, yet he had simply manufactured his own. Ghost guns, they were called, weapons without serial numbers that existed in a legal gray area. The incident renewed national attention on privately made firearms and the honor system that had allowed Neal to ignore a court order to disarm. Neighbors later told investigators they had repeatedly complained about Neal firing guns from his property. Deputies had visited his doorstep multiple times. He simply refused to answer the door. The Tehama County sheriff later faced criticism for failing to act more decisively on the warnings.

Rancho Tehama Elementary closed early for Thanksgiving break that year. When students returned on November 28, they walked back into a school that had been transformed into a crime scene and then slowly restored. The community, already struggling with poverty and isolation, now carried an additional burden. Five families had lost loved ones. Children who once played in the quadrangle now understood what those walls had protected them from. Sarah Lobdell's lockdown order, issued in the critical seconds before Neal crashed through the gates, became a case study in emergency response. In a place where help is far away, she had bought her students the only thing that mattered: time.